Google Reader Gears up for the next Generation – HTML5

HTML5 seems to be in rapid development now. All companies and officials are trying to get HTML5 a working release as soon as possible, main reason, demand. Web developers want to get the stable release of HTML5 soon. Google, being one of the many companies developing HTML5 knows about this problem. That’s why they are releasing support for HTML5 way before time.

Google reader has been tweaked up in the past month. The most significant was addition of HTML5 support. Its clear that Google can easily integrate HTML5 as they are the ones who are developing it.

Here are some changes made to Google Reader which is mainly because of the addition of HTML5:

1. HTML5 integration

Google Reader will now support the audio and video tags in HTML5.

2. Added “Not interested”

Now there is a “Not interested” link at the bottom of recommended items, so that you can both hide that item and provide your like & dislike.

3. Update reminder

To keep you updated, a small banner appears, stating “A new version of Google Reader is available” whenever a new version is released. Incidentally, it’s the 500th version of Reader over the 5 years.

4. Improvements to Reader Play

When you hit space (or shift-space), you’re now automatically moved between posts, and for posts with multiple images, cycled through each image. Also added made Play more configurable by letting you change URL used: If you add welcome=0 query parameter skips welcome screen for new & signed-out users. An autoplay=1 query parameter start moving through posts automatically. A #feed/<URL> fragment display specific feed. You can combine all these to make automatically playing slideshows of favourite photo-blogs.

5. Improved Speed

Of course there should be no doubt on this one. HTML5 has major speed improvements and Google is slowly implementing them. Home view loading is now faster, and Send to functionality being less susceptible to being stymied by popup blockers when used with services such as Twitter.

Google is slowly switching to HTML5. So are many other big companies. But if your a web developer wondering whether to switch to HTML5, I would say that this is not the time. Big companies like Google and Apple have added parts of HTML5 into their servers, not a complete change. HTML5 is still not stable. But since Google is the one that’s making it, they’ll know much better whether they should switch to HTML5 or not. We still have to wait till HTML5 gets is official release to know whether its a good choice to switch to HTML5.